UX Speaks Louder than Words

In addition to optimizing your website for Search Engines, it’s equally important, if not more important, to optimize your website for humans. Remember the old saying "Actions Speak Louder Than Words?” This proverb is just as relevant today as it was back in the day -- although nowadays, you can apply it to things like websites, user experience, and Digital Marketing. In a blog post about marketing, Michael Smith wrote:

Marketing is nothing to do with one department. It’s to do with the customer’s experience, strategically managed. When they view the website, order a book, contact customer services, read about you in the press, speak to reception, attend a book launch, have a complaint. So it is that marketing management is less about functional departmental delivery and more about strategic brand management.

In other words, you can have the slickest marketing materials in the world, but if other aspects of your business are lacking, you'll completely negate everything you say in your fancy brochures. Maintaining a reputable brand means doing a good job -- at everything. The same is true of websites. You can invest tons of time and effort into a great user experience design, but if your site is full of poor quality content, if the pages load slow, if the images aren’t optimized, or if you have a bunch of broken links, the user's experience won't be a very good one. If a user has a bad experience, they will leave the site right away and won’t be back. You're wasting everything you invested in UX design if the rest of your site isn't up to par.

Make sure your site lives up to….itself

Search engines strive to provide only the best possible results to searchers. How do you ensure that users have a great experience on your website? By making sure that it has all of the following:

• Page load times that are less than 2 seconds on both desktop and mobile

• Useful, clear, optimized images

• Contact Us and RFQ forms that are easy to find and fill out

• Informative, error-free copy that addresses the customers' questions and needs

• Site structure that makes sense and is simple and easy to follow

• Faceted search (for e-commerce sites)

• Apps that make things easier for users, such as CAD drawings, 3D models, distributor locators, and configurators

• An attractive design

• Solid SEO with UX in mind

• Helpful internal linking between pages

Ultimately, the goal of good UX is to help users do what they want to do when interacting with your site. Not sure where your site stands? Contact Ecreative today for comprehensive UX testing and analysis for your industrial website.